The bodies of babies and children in their bedrooms are among the horrors discovered in an Israeli farming village that was stormed by armed Hamas militants.

Israeli soldiers, who regained control of the Kfar Aza kibbutz, have described a “massacre” on the streets and inside homes of the rural community near the Gaza boundary.

Footage shows torched cars, furniture dumped on the road and burnt houses.

Soldiers have been collecting the bodies of civilians – and Hamas fighters – strewn throughout the once bucolic rural setting.

“You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms and how the terrorist kills them,” Major General Itai Veruv said on Wednesday (AEDT).

“It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre, he said, adding it was unlike anything he had seen in his life.

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One soldier said some of the women and children had been beheaded – “they cut head off children, cut head off women”, he said.

The Israel Defence Forces told CNN that women, children, toddlers and the elderly were “brutally butchered in an ISIS way of action”.

“We are aware of the heinous acts Hamas is capable of,” it added.

An Israeli soldier in a village where the bodies of Israeli civilians and dead Hamas soldiers lie. Photo: Getty

US President Joe Biden on Wednesday (AEDT) condemned the Hamas attacks as “an act of sheer evil” and said the militant group was “bloodthirsty”.

“There are moments in this life, and I mean this literally, when the pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend,” Biden said at the White House.

Biden described what he called “stomach-turning” reports of “parents butchered”, “babies being killed”, “entire families slain” and “women raped, assaulted and paraded as trophies”.

He affirmed that the US “stands with Israel”.

Israel has maintained a relentless assault on Gaza since Hamas fighters launched an unprecedented attack four days ago.

Israel said there would be “nowhere to hide” as it pounded the Palestinian enclave with the fiercest air strikes in the 75-year history of the conflict. Hamas fired back with hundreds of rockets.

Israel’s embassy in the US said the death toll from the weekend Hamas attacks had surpassed 1000.

Gaza’s health ministry said Israel’s retaliatory air strikes had killed at least 830 people and wounded 4250.

Israel has vowed to take its “mighty revenge” since gunmen rampaged through its towns, leaving streets strewn with bodies in by far the deadliest attack in its history.

Scores of Israelis were taken to Gaza as hostages, with some paraded through the streets.

Israel has called up hundreds of thousands of reservists and placed the Gaza Strip, crowded home to 2.3 million people, under a total siege.

Whole districts in Gaza have been flattened by Israeli air strikes since Hamas’ weekend attack.

The United Nations said 180,000 Gazans had been made homeless, many huddling on streets or in schools.

Smoke and flames rose into the morning sky, while bombardment of the roads often made it impossible for emergency crews to reach the scene of strikes.

At the morgue in Gaza’s Khan Younis hospital, bodies were laid on the ground on stretchers with their names written on their bellies.

Medics called for relatives to pick up bodies quickly because there was no more space for the dead.

There were heavy casualties in a former municipal building struck while being used as an emergency shelter for displaced families.

Three Gaza journalists were killed when an Israeli missile hit a building while they were outside reporting. A total of six journalists have been killed in Gaza since Saturday.

At one point, the Israeli military advised Gaza civilians to flee to Egypt, only to issue a quick clarification confirming the crossing was closed and there was no way out.

Israeli media said the death toll from the Hamas attacks had climbed to 900 people.

As for Hamas operatives, they had “nowhere to hide in Gaza”, military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said.

In Israel, there has still been no complete official count of the dead and missing from Saturday’s attacks.

Israel’s next move could be a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip, territory it abandoned in 2005 and has kept under blockade since Hamas took power there in 2007.

The total siege it announced on Monday would block even food and fuel from reaching the strip.

Israel was caught so completely off guard by Saturday’s attack that it took more than two days to finally seal off the multibillion-dollar high-tech barrier wall, meant to have been impenetrable.

Military spokesman Hagari said early on Tuesday there had been no new infiltrations from Gaza since the previous day.

Israeli leaders will now have to decide whether to constrain their retaliation to safeguard the hostages.

Hamas representative Abu Ubaida threatened on Monday to kill one Israeli captive for every Israeli bombing of a civilian house without warning – and to broadcast the killing.

Saturday’s attacks and Israel’s retaliation tore up the plans of diplomats in the Middle East at a crucial juncture, when Israel was on the verge of reaching an agreement to normalise relations with the richest Arab power, Saudi Arabia.

General Charles Q Brown, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Iran not to get involved.

Western countries have strongly backed Israel. Arab cities have seen street demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. Iran, Hamas’s patron, celebrated the attacks but denied playing a direct role in them.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday that Iran kissed the hands of the planners of the attacks, but that anyone who believed Iran was behind them was mistaken.

The attacks had delivered a military and intelligence defeat to Israel that was beyond repair, he said.

A deadly clash on Israel’s northern border on Monday raised fears of a second front in the war, with Iran’s other main ally in the area, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, being drawn into the fray.

It said it was not behind any incursion into Israel.

The US’s top general warned Iran not to get involved.

“We want to send a pretty strong message. We do not want this to broaden and the idea is for Iran to get that message loud and clear,” General Charles Q Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters travelling with him to Brussels.